Black and grey realistic flash design of two roses, two crossed revolvers, playing cards and banknotes, with no body placement shown.

Roses, revolvers and banknotes design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a rose at the top and another at the bottom, with two revolvers crossed in the centre and a fanned playing card and banknote details behind them. The linework is detailed and the shading is smooth and realistic, using greys and highlights on the metal, petals and paper. The image is a plain white background, with the motifs stacked vertically in a tall, narrow composition.

Realism Rose Revolver Gun Playing card Banknote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shooting gallery at the back of the Michaelmas fair smells of scorched cork and candyfloss, and the man behind the card table has already clocked how you hold your hand. You rode in on the back of a fruit lorry from Ipswich with eleven pounds and a bent ace tucked in your sock. Tonight the baize is pegged out beside the dodgems, and the crowd is three deep with lads who want to lose their wages to someone who looks like he knows what he is doing. So you let them believe it.

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Your opponent is Eddie Marrow, who ran the rose stall for thirty years and never once bought a bloom. Pinned to his lapel is a paper rose, grey as a sixpence. On the shelf behind him sits a revolver the fairground keeps for show, its cylinder rusted solid since the Coronation. Nobody here has ever seen it fired, and that is the point of it. Eddie deals fast and talks slow, and every time he wins a hand he tucks a dead petal into the till.

Third hand he pushes a crisp hundred dollar bill across the felt as a bet, folded like a bloom. You count the deck in your head: both aces of diamonds gone, one buried under the tip jar, one in the dealer's cuff. You call. He shows a pair of queens. You show the ace of spades you have been holding since dusk, and the crowd groans in the right direction.

The dodgems sputter, the lights dip, and Eddie's grin goes thin. He does not reach for the revolver. He slides the note back to you and says the house keeps the roses. You fold it into your breast pocket, step out past the lit wheel, and realise the only loaded thing in that tent was the pair of you.